


Cohabitation

by Haberdasher



Series: Statement Fics [1]
Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: College, Gen, Inspired by Real Events, Nonbinary Character, Original Character(s), Original Character-centric, Original Statement (The Magnus Archives), POV Original Character, Statement Fic, mistaken for insane, unreality
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-11
Updated: 2020-04-11
Packaged: 2021-03-02 02:08:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,056
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23587405
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Haberdasher/pseuds/Haberdasher
Summary: Statement of Quinn Morgan regarding their imaginary roommate. Inspired by real events.
Series: Statement Fics [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2026159
Comments: 8
Kudos: 37





	Cohabitation

Statement of Quinn Morgan regarding their imaginary roommate. Original statement given September 13, 2012. Audio recording by Jonathan Sims, Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute, London.

Statement begins.

It all started as something of a joke, really. I’d call it an inside joke, but can you really call it that when you’re the only one in on it? I never thought it’d get so out of hand but, well, here we are.

See, my freshman year in college--university, I guess you’d call it?--my original roommate moved out to room with one of her friends instead. Not a big loss, really, she was always up later than me and was way more into the party scene than I’d ever be. Anyway, housing said they’d replace her, but spring semester came and went without me getting a roommate, which was fine by me. I liked the peace and quiet, liked having the extra space to myself, liked being able to come and go as I pleased.

Sophomore year, though, I knew that would all change. I hadn’t made much in the way of friends in my freshman year, and those I had made were generally male, which. Well. My own gender is more complex than checking off one of the usual two boxes, but to be fair to housing even _I_ hadn’t realized that bit yet. Suffice it to say rooming with any of my guy friends simply wasn’t an option, at least not then and there.

So I went in for a random roommate. Housing said they’d paired me with someone, but didn’t pass along any details besides a phone number that gave me an error message when I tried calling it. Wasn’t sure what to expect when I got back on campus. Honestly, I was kind of scared they’d paired me with some weirdo, even though I suppose by that logic, I’d be “some weirdo” as well.

Whatever I was expecting, though, it wasn’t for move-in day to come and go without my roommate arriving.

I spent a couple days wondering if they’d just missed move-in day somehow, if they’d show up with no notice and start moving things in, but after a week I was starting to doubt that my roommate was ever going to show. I sent housing a vaguely-worded email asking about my roommate, but when they responded asking if there was a problem, I... I didn’t respond. I should have told them the truth of the situation, I suppose, but I figured what they didn’t know wouldn’t hurt them, and I’d enjoy what time I could with the room all to myself.

They stuck a little white-board outside the door of each dorm room for people to write their names, an easy way to introduce yourself to your neighbors, I guess. So I put my name on there--well, my deadname, since I was still using it at the time. And then after a bit of thought, I added the name Heather. I’d never known anyone named Heather, but I’d always thought it was a pretty name, maybe something I’d name a baby girl somewhere down the road. It was a normal enough name, too, one that wouldn’t raise eyebrows or get people asking too many questions. And this way, people passing by my dorm room wouldn’t know that I’d managed to nab a room by myself. Just me and Heather, two ordinary roommates in an ordinary dorm room, nothing to see there, definitely no great conspiracy to be unearthed.

Maybe if I’d stopped there, that’d be all it ever was, just a name on a sign that helped me fool housing into not forcing another roommate on me. But that was just the start of it.

See, I’d always fancied myself a bit of a writer, even though classes freshman year taught me well enough that while I enjoyed it at my own pace, it wasn’t something I’d want to major in, let alone get a career doing. So now that my supposed roommate had a name, I started thinking of her like just another character in one of my stories.

I gave her a full name, one generic enough that it could be the name of someone going to school here--Heather Anne Johnson, I settled on. I decided she’d transferred from another local school, one that some people joked didn’t exist because nobody ever met anyone from there despite them being one town over, though the real explanation was probably just that school being super small compared to us and a lot more religious to boot.

And then I went and made a Facebook profile for her, partly to flesh her out a bit and give me a place to put all these ideas for her I’d come up with, partly so if housing did come snooping around she’d seem more like a real student. The profile picture was a photo of a lilac bush I found on Google, I had “Heather” join the school page and a few others, she even shared a few memes I came across. If you did some research I’m sure you would’ve figured out that her life story only existed through that Facebook page, but at a glance I thought it’d seemed believable enough.

Apparently I was right about that bit, because when I checked on it a week later it had a few friend requests from actual students at my school. I think one of them shared a bio class with me, but I didn’t know any of them super well. I accepted all the requests, though, figured that’d just make the page seem that much more real. I updated it every couple days, too--not on any kind of a schedule, just when I was bored, which was pretty common.

I wasn’t the most social person... I’m still not, I suppose. But when it happened to come up in conversation, I’d tell whoever was asking that I had a roommate, maybe share her name and a few other tidbits about her (I’d decided she had brown hair, was kind of a neat freak, and was majoring in philosophy) if it seemed necessary. It’d all fall apart if anyone visited my dorm room--I hadn’t gone so far as to actually set up the other bed in the room or give “Heather” a separate living space--but nobody ever did. And housing never bothered me again after they responded to that one email of mine, so on that end, it worked just fine, I guess. Nobody suspected that I’d managed to get a room all to myself.

Heather kept getting friend requests from both people I knew and people I didn’t, as I’d post fairly generic status updates and share posts from other students, and at one point I realized my nonexistent roommate had more friends who went to school with me than I did, which... it’s sad, definitely, but I’m not sure whether it says more about how persuasive I was or how little of a social life I had. Probably a little of both.

Then one of my handful of friends from freshman year, Tyson Hunter, asked me about her, a couple weeks after I’d accepted his friend request on her profile. Said Heather had looked sad the last time he’d seen her, and he wanted to make sure she was doing okay.

Now, the one thing I’d never done is posted an actual picture of what Heather was supposed to look like. I’d replaced that lilac bush profile picture with a few other things--rainbows, cartoons, waterfalls, other flowers--but never any of an actual person. I knew I was crossing some lines here, but I wasn’t catfishing anyone at least. So there was no way Tyson could’ve seen what Heather looked like, because she didn’t look like _anything_ , besides the vague descriptions I’d give whenever anyone asked.

Maybe I should’ve told the truth then. Tyson’s a good guy--a smart-ass sometimes, sure, but a nice enough person--and I doubt he’d have ratted me out to housing if I’d just come clean then and there. But now that it came up, I felt kind of weird about having not let him know in the first place, and I didn’t want to just up and confess.

So instead, I just asked some questions, trying not to seem as confused as I really was. What did he mean, “the last time he’d seen her”? When was that? Where was that?

And Tyson said he’d seen her in the halls of the philosophy building the day before, and she kept looking down at the floor and biting her lip, and she looked like she was trying to hold back tears.

I changed the subject after that, because... because it was weird, and because obviously he’d just bumped into some random student who happened to resemble how I’d described Heather and assumed it was her. Which was awkward, given the reality of the situation, and meant that some random brunette had been near tears yesterday, but even if I’d wanted to track down this supposedly-Heather, it’s a big school, that’d take forever. So I tried to just move on and forget about that.

A couple days later another friend of mine, Jack Murphy, said that that roommate of mine, Heather, was, and I quote, “a total hottie”, and was she single, because if so he was interested.

I blurted out that sure, she was single, before actually thinking through my response. I assumed Jack must have mistaken some other student for Heather like Tyson did, and asked where he’d seen her?

Jack’s answer wasn’t as clear as Tyson’s had been. He just said he’d seen her “around” a bunch of times, and that she was cute, that he liked her freckles and her dimples and the way her glasses framed her deep brown eyes. Which... I had decided she had brown eyes, actually, but I was pretty sure I hadn’t mentioned that to anyone because who just casually brings up their roommate’s eye color in a conversation?

So one of my friends was drooling over a girl that he thought was the roommate I didn’t actually have. Great.

I think it was when Jack asked if I could set him up with Heather that I realized I was in way too deep.

I told him I’d talk to her about it, but no promises, and then I went to my dorm room and saw the bare bed next to mine and just... just burst out laughing, because all this was ridiculous, really.

This was all during finals week, by the way, which... probably didn’t help my test scores any, but it did mean winter break was right around the corner, so I just stalled Jack until then, figured I could figure out what to tell him about my roommate that didn’t exist over the break.

That winter break was... intense. It’s when I realized I was nonbinary, for one thing, and when my parents sprung on me that they were getting a divorce, for another. So I didn’t have that much time to think about the whole Heather thing. But the couple of times I checked her Facebook profile, a few people had sent messages about sharing classes with Heather--one from some upper-level philosophy class, one from contemporary world history, and two from intro to psych. All things that were probably the sort of classes she’d take if, you know, she took classes at all.

I ignored the messages, and when winter break was up and I met up with Jack again, I told him I hadn’t had time to talk things over with Heather yet, which, well, technically not a lie, right? Jack gave me a folded-up piece of paper and said to pass it along to Heather, let him know what her reaction was.

I just... I just nodded and went along with it. I didn’t look at the thing. I was sure it was a confession of love, or bad love poetry, or something else of the sort, and I really didn’t want to read any of that. I just tucked the piece of paper into my pocket, and when I got back to my dorm room that night, I chucked it onto the bare, empty bed that would be Heather’s if she existed, before going to sleep.

The next day, after going to classes and eating dinner with Tyson, I noticed that the piece of paper wasn’t where I’d thrown it on the empty bed anymore. After a bit of searching, I found that it hadn’t just fallen off, but had somehow ended up in my garbage bin. I opened it, then, and from what I could make out it was exactly the sort of thing I’d expected, a nicely-worded letter asking one Heather Johnson on a date, but what stood out most was the big X drawn to cover nearly the entire page in what looked like red Sharpie.

All of that’s weird, of course, but the part that stuck out to me was that I didn’t even own a red Sharpie, or a red marker for that matter, just a single black Sharpie and a lot of pens and pencils. I figured the rest could be chalked up to- to sleepwalking, or some sort of mental break, or something, but there was no way I could’ve put that big red X on there.

Things kept getting weirder from there, but from the end of January on it, it kind of starts to blur together in my mind. The Facebook account I’d made for Heather started having friends I didn’t remember adding, even a few that weren’t students at the school I went to. Jack came to me red-faced one evening saying that he’d asked Heather about the note he’d written for her and she’d laughed in his face, and it’d been right in front of the cafeteria so half the school saw. Tyson kept asking me questions about Heather’s new boyfriend. Heather’s Facebook account suddenly said that she _had_ a new boyfriend, which I certainly hadn’t put there. (Aaron, I think his name was? Aaron Masters, maybe? I, I didn’t look into it that closely. Think I was a bit scared to look too close, honestly.) I got a noise complaint from a night I hadn’t even been in my room, since I’d pulled an all-nighter in the library just before a big midterm. My parents asked questions about that nice girl they heard in the background of all my phone calls. I kept finding garbage in my bin that I was sure wasn’t mine, like- like a bag of salt and vinegar chips, when I _hate_ those...

Eventually I just broke down. Jack asked me something about Heather--I don’t even remember what he asked now--and I just snapped at him that Heather wasn’t real, I didn’t have a roommate, I made her up and I didn’t get why everybody was just going along with it so much, so stop asking about my imaginary roommate already!

He’d stared at me for a long minute before just shaking his head and saying that it wasn’t funny, that I could do a lot better than that if I was trying to mess with his head.

I hadn’t even realized it was April Fools’ Day.

I snapped at Tyson the day after, though, and then my parents later that evening, and I think that’s when everybody realized it wasn’t just a joke or a prank or whatever, that something was seriously wrong.

The rest of April was... well. I got pulled out of school, thrown in a psych ward for a bit, and then forced into a _lot_ of therapy when I got home. Because everybody thinks I’m the crazy one here, everybody thinks Heather’s real and I’m the weird one for thinking she’s not. But I swear I’m sane! I mean, I got diagnosed with ADD as a kid, and I’ve kind of suspected I might have some kind of social anxiety for a while now, but nothing where I’d have any sort of break with reality like that.

Heather Anne Johnson was a name I assigned to a roommate I didn’t have. She never existed. Except- except everybody thinks she _did_ , now. Everybody except me, anyway.

I’m taking what I’m calling a gap year, though I think usually that’s for when you do it before college, not right in the middle, but it sounds nice at least. Told my parents I thought backpacking across Europe would be good for me, help me get back in touch with the world around me. And some of that was true, but really I just wanted to put as many miles between me and my old school, between me and _Heather_ , as I could.

I’ve been trying to avoid information about her now, but in the middle of June I tried logging into her old Facebook profile, just for shits and giggles, and I couldn’t. The password I’d used for the account for all those months didn’t work anymore. And my computer had saved it, so I wasn’t just typing it in wrong, either.

And around the end of August I checked her profile, thinking about how it’d been almost a year since Heather first came to be and how much had changed since then, and I saw Heather had posted a status just a few days before saying that she was excited to start her junior year of school and meet her new roommate.

I don’t know what good telling you my story will do. You probably won’t believe it any more than the therapists and psychiatrists all did. But I want it on record somewhere, anyway. Because I keep thinking about that latest status update. Keep thinking that whoever Heather’s new roommate is, they’re in for one hell of a time, if they exist any more than she does.

Keep thinking maybe things could have gone even worse for me than they did, in the end.

I think however this gap year of mine ends, it won’t be with me going back to school there. The last thing I want is to hear about someone else’s run-ins with the roommate I invented.

Statement ends.

**Author's Note:**

> If you're wondering about the real events that inspired this fic... well, I won't get too deep into it (because I'm still a little embarrassed by the real story, honestly), but here's some information about which bits are and aren't the same as reality.
> 
> Quinn Morgan is sort of a self-insert, but while some bits of their life are semi-autobiographical, some bits were changed or added just because it felt right for the story. I'll focus on the bits related to Heather here.
> 
> The freshman year description of having a roommate that switched rooms and never getting assigned another is more or less how my freshman year rooming situation went, though it was a bit more complicated than this fic suggests; additionally, my sophomore year rooming situation came about via a more complicated story than simply "housing assigned me a roommate who never showed", but ended with the same outcome of me having a room to myself the entire year.
> 
> I really did invent an imaginary roommate my sophomore year, and she really was named Heather; the full name wasn't Heather Anne Johnson, but the middle and last names were similarly generic. I really did make a Facebook profile for her that really did post generic statuses and the like, too. However, it didn't start as an attempt to get housing not to give me a (real) roommate, but as an inside joke with friends, though being bored and liking to invent characters was probably an element there as well.
> 
> The supernatural or borderline-supernatural elements are entirely fabricated. Everybody who mentioned knowing or meeting Heather was in on her being my imaginary roommate, and most if not all of her Facebook friends knew she didn't really exist.
> 
> The date of the statement lines up both so as to fit when I myself went to college and so as to have Quinn give their statement at a time when I was actually in or around London; however, I was there for a study abroad semester, not as part of a backpacking gap year.
> 
> If this story sounds familiar to you, and you went to a small liberal arts college in the American South at the right time, it's possible you already know the real story of "Heather".


End file.
